The present invention relates to a system and method that support the scalable acquisition of telemetry data from instrumented entities over a wireless network.
One of the roles of sensor network middleware is to acquire data from entities bearing sensors, and distribute the acquired sensor data to various applications that process the sensor data, according to the application requirements. Middleware is known to be deployed as a service, or to provide services accessible over the Internet by the applications. The middleware provides the various applications access to large numbers (e.g., millions) of sensor-bearing entities (e.g., cell phones, automobiles) over a wireless network. The middleware acts as a gate keeper (gateway) between the various applications and the sensor-bearing entities. This form of deployment is desirable because the middleware is accessible to any application having access to the Internet, and required permissions to access the middleware service(s). Deploying such known middleware service, however, is not without shortcomings.
In view of the fact that the middleware is deployed to provide access to large numbers of clients, and that the various applications can request frequent sensor readings for their particular purposes, the middleware must support (service) extremely high rates of data. Such very high data rates can overwhelm “off-the-shelf” application server technology and applications that are not designed for high or extremely throughput requirements. Because multiple applications may subscribe to data from the same client, the client may be overloaded in the absence of technology that helps it manage the subscriptions. Accordingly, wireless links between the clients and the middleware server may be overloaded, or cost the middleware provider significant amounts of money where data flow from clients to the middleware is not optimized. Consequently, applications are overloaded by the telemetry streams of large numbers of clients.
Efforts to increase efficiency in the middleware can decrease timeliness of data reaching the application, requiring effort to preserve an application's timeliness requirements under such circumstances. And while the field of sensor-network middleware is actively developing, with improved sensor network designs that address a wide range of known shortcomings in the art, no solutions that address this form of scalability challenge are not known.
Hence, there is a distinct need in the art for a system or method that operates to acquire telemetry data from instrumented entities that overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art.